Making Connections Online

As I discussed in my first post, the first step in my ancestor hunt was the obvious one: to consult with my living relatives to find out what information they had that didn’t get passed down to me. I also screwed up my courage to start making connections with relatives I didn’t know.

Great-Grandfather Joseph and Great-Grandmother Henriette had, I was told, 16 children together. With the help of the census records and the microfilmed early vital records for the state of Michigan, I was able to learn the names of 14 of them; only 8 of them (including Grandpa) had survived to adulthood. I was able to learn a bit more about the others, but not enough to track down their living descendants.

I knew that there were other people from Michigan surnamed Chosa who were clearly not descendants of great-grandfather Joseph; one of them was also working on his ancestry. Thinking he might be a descendant of a brother of my great-grandfather, I sent him an e-mail. No reply. (Years later I figured out that we are in fact related, but the connection was about 5 or 6 generations back, so I don’t hold a grudge against this man.)

None of the relatives I consulted knew anything about whether Joseph had any siblings who also came to the US. So I joined a few useful mailing lists and prowled through the surname message boards at Rootsweb, Ancestry.com, and other main genealogy sites. At the very least, I hoped to find people whose surnames could be variants of Chosa, to learn where their ancestors had settled in this country, and what their descendants knew about where they came from in Quebec.

I connected with quite a number of people researching the same surname or one of its variants. I was able to assist several people who were researching their own connections to various Chosas in my line, and I met a few cousins online who, unfortunately, knew less about my great-grandparents than I did.

Best of all, I connected with a cousin who was descended from Great-Grandmother Henriette’s brother Gabriel. She shared genealogical gold with me: she had seen the marriage record at the Assinins Indian Mission, which was dated 16 June 1855 and which stated Joseph’s age to be 22. Assuming that the age was absolutely precise, this placed his birth sometime between 17 Jun 1832 and 15 Jun 1833. However, I was aware that the age might easily be a year or so off.

I also began searching for the names of all my great-grandparents on the Internet. I still do this regularly for them and for other ancestors, because a Google search may turn up all kinds of tidbits that weren’t there the last time I looked.

Since many, many people from Quebec are extremely passionate about genealogy and tracing their own family history, there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands of websites dealing with Quebec ancestry. I was hoping that one of those researchers might have a gap in his own family tree because no one knows whatever happened to his great-great-grandmother’s brother—who happened to have my great-grandfather’s name and was born in the right time frame.

No such luck.

I turned to the FamilySearch site run by the Mormons (LDS church) Family History Library. Just enter the name and country and a date if you have one, and you’re likely to turn up information from their Ancestral Files, Pedigree Resource Files, IGI (International Genealogical Index), Vital Records Index, SSDI (Social Security Death Index), and censuses. These may turn up leads to vital records for your family.

Unfortunately, some of the LDS records, especially Ancestral Files and the IGI, are just plain wrong: people hoping to retroactively baptize all their discoverable ancestors are like the rest of us: human and easily capable of making mistakes. If you are looking to find the parents (names unknown) of François Pepin, you may not realize just how many François Pepins in the same age bracket there are out there at any given time, and pick the wrong one to inscribe on your pedigree.

Nowadays, Ancestry.com has the Drouin Collection of Canadian records online; you have to buy a World Deluxe membership to access it at home, or go down to your local LDS Family History Center and access the collection from their computers. And unfortunately, Ancestry’s search engine, to put it kindly, does not handle French names very well, especially if you don't know what area to search. (It has, however, improved considerably since those first Quebec records came online.)

FamilySearch is now indexing its vast collection of genealogical records and putting the original images of those records online, but the indexing stage is still in its infancy. You can, however, browse through images of a fair number of their original microfilmed Quebec parish records at this site, and it won’t cost you a dime. But back then, I had to order microfilms and hope.

I still had no idea where to find Great-Grandfather Joseph’s family in Quebec, but I was learning about the sources available to me, and about the genealogy research process in general. I was connecting with living family members whose existence had been previously unknown to me. Someday, I hoped, I would be able to connect all of us back to the ancestral families who came from France centuries ago to build a new life in the harsh conditions of New France.

Making connections: that’s what genealogy is all about.

The Devil's In The "Dit" Names

When I was trying to figure out how to find out my Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birth name, I ran straight into the problem of “dit” names. “Dit” means “said” or “called”; essentially, they are added names or nicknames, vital in a society where many people had the same surname (because of the small number of early settlers) and where certain personal names were extremely common.

I had already encountered this kind of thing in researching my Danish ancestry. Until the mid-1800s, very few ordinary folk in Denmark had genuine surnames. Instead, they used patronyms: if your father was named Jens, you were a Jensen (or Jensdatter). Since every parish would have, for example, several Peder Sørensens, it was necessary to use added names (“tilnavne”) so that you could have ordinary conversations without having to make long-winded explanations about which Peder Sørensen you meant.

These could indicate an occupation, an associated place, a personal characteristic—or simply the added name used by a previous occupant of the cottage you lived in. In addition, the Danish Army assigned to every rural recruit the name of his birthplace (parish, village, or even farm) as a military tilnavn. Many recruits kept their military tilnavne once they were released from the army, especially if they decided to live someplace other than their birthplace.

In 17th-century France, and therefore in early Quebec, the original dit names, like the Danish military tilnavne, were often “noms de guerre”, military added names of personnel, essential because some surnames were very common and some men didn’t have surnames at all. When a commander had 3 men in his company named Pierre Roi and 6 other men surnamed Roi plus several men with no surnames at all, he would assign a dit name to each. He knew that he needed to be able to give orders quickly in the heat of battle, without going into long-winded explanations as to which man was being ordered to take a particular action.

So, as soon as he was enlisted, one Pierre Roi might become Pierre Roi-dit-Dejardins (and plain “Dejardins!” in the heat of battle), the second might be Roi-dit-Lapensée, and the third might be Roi-dit-St-Jean because that was the name of his home parish. Some of the Roi recruits might already have dit names inherited from earlier family members who had served. Men who didn’t have surnames already were assigned names which then became surnames.

You can read more about military origins of many Quebec dit names here.

However, society changes with the times, and not all dit names came from military service. Very early in the history of Quebec, dit names often were adopted to distinguish between unrelated civilians with the same surname. Joseph Levasseur dit de Nere was nobleman and the royal engineer in charge of fortifications, while Jean and Pierre Levasseur were brothers from a line of master sculptors and woodworkers; Jean used the dit name Lavigne, while Pierre used L’esperance.

Quebec families tended to have lots of children (12 or more was not uncommon), and certain personal names were extremely popular, so that If the extended family stayed in the same area for two or three generations, there would be lots of them with identical names. The descendants of two brothers might take on as dit names the surname or dit name of their wives. For example, several of the children of Pierre Levasseur dit L’esperance used their mother’s surname, Chanverlange, as a dit name. As with Danish tilnavne, dit names enabled you to tell people apart . . . at least for the first two or three generations.

When I first discovered dit names, I knew that I needed help, so I looked online and discovered Robert J. Quintin’s The Dit Name: French-Canadian Surnames, Aliases, Adulterations, and Anglicizations. I bought a copy immediately. This excellent source is now out of print, but there are probably some used copies still available.

Tanguay’s Dictionnaire has a listing of dit names matched with surnames and you can access that online. You can also download a list of common surnames and associated dit names; it’s not complete, but it’s a good start if any of your Quebec ancestral names are in it.

I discovered that the word “dit” does not always appear in the written record when a dit name is being used, and I think I know why. It’s a tad faster to write Dubois-Jolicoueur than it is to write Dubois-dit-Jolicoeuer and over time, it saves a bit on ink and paper. This was not a silly issue in the early days of Quebec, when paper was imported from France and you had to make your own ink; the practice also let you go a bit longer between sharpenings of your quill pen.

Anyone, male or female, might appear in one record with the surname only, in another record with surname plus dit name, and in yet another with the dit name only. If your ancestor’s personal name was, for example, Jean-François, he may be Jean-François in one record, plain Jean in another, and plain François in another. Combine the variations of both personal names, surnames, and dit names and the confusion multiplies accordingly.

Getting nervous? Wait, it gets worse: sometimes people apparently forgot which name was the original and which was the dit name. I learned there are plenty of records where the dit name was used as the surname and the original surname became the dit name. Even worse, most surnames are associated with multiple dit names and most dit names are associated with multiple surnames.

In the case of my great-grandfather, I was lucky: there were only two dit names listed that he might have used. Chaussé is a relatively uncommon name. His original surname might have been plain Chaussé, Han-dit-Chaussé, or Chaussé-dit-Lemeine (these are all completely separate family lines). This meant that I had to look not only for Chaussé under all possible spellings but also for Han (or An or even Ham) or Lemeine as part of the mix. His baptism record might even have called him Chaussé-dit-Han or Lemeine-dit-Chaussé.

I am thankful that when I started all this, I didn't know that because Great-Grandfather Joseph was born about 1831ish, long past the end of the French Regime, he might have been recorded with a newer dit name derived from, say, his mother or an in-law: a name therefore not in the lists of dit names for Chaussé. That would have been scary.

I am also thankful that Great-Grandfather Joseph, who crossed the border and settled in the USA—where surname plus dit name would be distinctly “un-American”— did not choose to “americanize” his identity by translating his French surname into possibles like Girdle, Stocking, Shoe, Ground, Street, or even Ham. He might have chosen between using his surname or his dit name as his American surname on the basis of which was shorter and/or easier for speakers of English to pronounce, but Chaussé didn't seem to be much improvement over Han or Lemeine.

Even so, I realized that I would have to search for him in Quebec among dozens of possible combinations and spellings.

It's little things like this that make some rookie genealogists give up and decide to take up gardening instead.

Tags: genealogy, Quebec, dit names, Chaussé

What's In A Name?

The first brick wall I slammed into was the identity of my Grandpa’s father. I knew that Grandpa had been born in Michigan and that his father’s name on this side of the border was Joseph Chosa. I knew that Joseph had come to Michigan as an adult from somewhere in Quebec. I was new to genealogy, so I thought it would be a fairly straightforward and simple matter to trace him back to his birthplace.

It took almost 4 years.

You see, no one still living knew just where or when my Great-Grandfather Joseph had been born. Worse, no one knew exactly what his original name was. And you can’t trace anyone if you can’t recognize his (or her) name when you see it.

It took forever just to find Joseph and his family in the federal censuses, even though I knew where they had lived and the area was not exactly a booming metropolis. Even now, you can’t find him in the censuses online using, say, Ancestry.com; you have to go through the census for the county where he lived, page by page. Why? Because American census takers, like many of us even now, were extremely creative in spelling and pronouncing even English names; when dealing with names from a foreign language, anything could happen, and usually did.

I think this is why so many immigrants “americanized” their surnames. Some simply lopped off syllables, as when Rosenberg became Rose or Berg. Some translated the names into English: Giovanni LaCasa became John House, Heinrich Schmidtz became Henry Smith, and François Boisvert became Frank Greenwood. Others changed the spelling into an English version: a Dane named Jens Pedersen might become John or James Peterson.

French-Canadians could sometimes get away with simplifying the spelling and pronunciation a tad: Jourdain might have become Jordan, Petit might have become Petty, Lamontagne might have become Lamontaine. And of course, some people changed their names completely: Pyotr Ivanovich might have become John Chandler, and if John is your ancestor, good luck in backtracking him.

According to family lore, when my great-grandfather Joseph arrived in Michigan from Quebec, it wasn’t long before someone asked how his surname was spelled. He replied, “You spell it like it sounds.” So Joseph appears in American records as Chousse, Chousay, Chusse, Chose, Shoussay, Shosa, Chause, Choca, and Chosa. Our branch of the family settled on Chosa, which is easy to spell and pronounce; as I eventually discovered, others settled on Chausse, Chaussee, Shosa, Shosey etc.

Now, Joseph is a very common name both in French and in English; I felt that it was very likely to have been his original personal name (or part of it). So I knew that I was “probably” looking for a Joseph whose surname sounded like “Show-say”, and—based on a year of college French—I deduced that the surname probably started with “Ch”. Sounds simple, oui?

Mais non!

In the first place, I didn’t have a reference of any sort that listed French surnames, and poking around in random church registers hoping to see a surname that sounded like “Show-say” could easily take me years (and cost a lot of money in microfilm rentals), without yielding any results at all. Poking around on the Internet, however, I found a reference to Tanguay as being a good starting point for French-Canadian genealogy.

At that time, Tanguay’s Dictionnaire Généalogique des Familles Canadiennes was available as a free download on the internet, so I downloaded it, started at the section of surnames beginning with “Ch” and soon found that the most likely surname for my great-grandfather was Chaussé. I now had a genuine Quebec surname to look for. Tanguay did not, however, tell me anything about my great-grandfather; the Dictionnaire only goes up to about 1765, decades before my great-grandfather was born.

I’m truly sorry to have to tell you that you can’t get Tanguay as a free download anymore. However, there is a site where you can read Tanguay online for free. It is, of course, written in French. In fact, as I discovered early on, virtually all of the records of the French-speaking population of Quebec were and are written in French (except for early Jesuit records, which are often in Latin).

This was a facer for me: my college days had been back in the late Cretaceous and that French course had hardly been enough to make me fluent even then. However, I still had my old French-English dictionary and I was able to flounder on.

If you don’t know any French, you simply will not be able to pursue ancestors in French Canada. Even a course in conversational French for travelers won’t be much help with 300-year-old French documents. You need to be able to read French. At the very least you need to be able to look at a written French name and pronounce it correctly in order to determine if it’s your ancestor’s name disguised by an alternate spelling.

You also need a French-English dictionary, preferably an old one since time and modern communications have altered the old pronunciations. Mine is a 1951 edition of Cassell’s New French Dictionary which I bought second-hand. I use it constantly in my Quebec research, because if you mine every record you find for details, it's easier to get past those maddening brick walls.

Once I figured out what the original French surname of Great-Grandfather Joseph “probably” was, things didn’t get a lot easier. There are many different ways to spell many of the French sounds and therefore many ways a name may be spelled in the Quebec records.

I’ll give you some examples.

An initial “H” is silent, so the surname Harel may appear in French records as Arel or Arell.

A final consonant can disappear in pronunciation, so the “standard” Hébert may be written as Héber—as well as Ébert or Éber.

The sound of long “O” as in English “go”—very common in French surnames—can be spelled many different ways. Perrault therefore can be spelled “Pero”, “Perot”, “Perrau”, “Peraut”, “Perraux”, “Pereau”, “Pereaut”, “Pereaux”, “Pereault”; these are the most common variations, but there are others.

The sound of long “A” as in English “wave” has many spelling variations, so Beauvais could appear in the records as “Beauvé”, “Beauvet”, “Beauvest”, “Beauvais”, “Beauvai”, “Beauvay”, “Beauvays”, “Beauvait”, “Bauvé”, “Bovest” etc.

Why all the variations? Well, for one thing, until the 20th century, there was no such thing as standardized spelling for most European languages, including both British and American English. Like Great-Grandfather Joseph, “you spell it like it sounds.”

Not only that, but until the 20th century, universal public education didn’t exist either. Many people were illiterate and could not even sign their own names. Even French clerics (presumably well educated) who presided over religious rites commonly spelled the names of their parishioners in different ways from one record to the next. Lay people who could read and write often spelled their own names differently in different documents.

If you think all of this sounds complicated, you’re right. It is complicated. But as I soon found out, it gets worse. In my next post, I’ll discuss dit names.

Wading Into the Gene Pool

My father was an immigrant from Denmark. My mother’s ancestry is French-Canadian and Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe or Chippewa). While I was growing up, both of them often talked about their childhood and their families. I was their only child; I soaked it all up like a sponge.

Well, I grew up. I went to college and then on to graduate school at Berkeley in the rebellious sixties. I met a guy, we fell in love, then we rebelled against the rebellion by getting married. We had kids; eventually we became grandparents. That was when I realized that someday, my grandchildren would want to know about their family history. I also realized that I was the only one around with enough information to get started, with training in general research techniques, and with enough free time to devote to the pursuit of elusive ancestors.

So I took the plunge.

From the first, and at the same time, I was researching both my mother's family and my father's family in Denmark. And of course, in order to pass on all or their heritage to my future descendants, I was also trying to find out everything possible about my husband's family, who were Jews with origins in Poland and what is now Ukraine.

My husband's extended family cooperated splendidly, providing me with oral history as well as photos, documents, and specific information as to names and approximate dates, so I was able to make reasonable progress there.

My dad had already passed away before I began, and I had lost touch with my Danish cousins, but I still remembered what he'd told me, and I had much of his documentation and had actually known my grandparents and their other children and grandchildren. I didn't know a lot of Danish, but since Danish is related to German and I had studied that language in college, I was able to make good progress on my Danish ancestry.

My mother's ancestry was another story. Mom was more than willing to pitch in and help with her side of the family, digging out old photos and documents, dredging up memories, and calling other relatives who might have additional information. Meanwhile, I prowled the Internet and read books on how to do genealogical research and wished that I had a brother or sister to help out.

If only that cousin who had worked out a family tree for my paternal grandfather had died without sharing any of it . . . Well, you have to play the cards you’re dealt. I was going to have to work it out for myself.

This blog is about my quest to discover my French-Canadian ancestors.

Ten years ago, internet genealogy was just starting to gear up into the monster it is today. There were some family trees on ancestry.com and rootsweb.com (which were separate entities then); there were some surname and locality message boards and mailing lists; some of the US censuses were online; and a few genealogical organizations (such as GenWeb) had websites with helpful information; that was about it. Even the Ellis Island website wasn’t up yet. I would have to do most of my research with microfilms.

It took me six long months to work up the nerve to go down to the local Family History Center and start ordering microfilms. I know that sounds a little strange, but I’ve always been the kind of person who has to rehearse what I’m going to say before I call the pharmacy to order a refill on a prescription. Even then, I concentrated first on getting and saving documentary proof of everything that we all thought we knew.

Why do I collect and save every bit of documentation that I can find? Well, the first reason is that we don’t always know what we think we know. Without a DNA test, the identity of your own father is a matter of faith.

The second reason is that my college and graduate training in English and history had taught me to mine documents for every scrap of information, including hidden agendas and general trustworthiness.

Later on I discovered a third reason to have a digital copy or a photocopy of every document: every time I ran into a brick wall and didn’t know what to do next, I could go back and re-examine the records I’d already found, to see what I might have missed the first time. This is especially useful when I’m dealing with antique handwriting, damaged documents, and documents written in a foreign language: l usually discover something I missed the first time around.

Believe me, in those first couple of years, I missed a lot, especially working my mother's side of the family. I knew the names my immigrant French-Canadians used in the United States, of course. What I didn't know was the original names they'd had before they crossed the border. Without those, I would never be able to find them in Quebec and take the family lines farther back.